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| | Seeds on the Ground | | | Music Artist : | | Cold Fairyland | | Music Style : | | Styles | | Release Date : | | 2007-09-18 | | Store Price : | | $18.99 | | Artistopia's Price: $18.99 | |
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Other Artist Albums
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Customer Reviews of This Album/CD |
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 Unique East - West fusion
Submitted on: 2009-05-02 |
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I have been seeking out new music from China moves beyond both local traditional forms and Western genres. This is the best I have heard, mixing influences from West and East using an unusual range of instruments: pipa, drums, bass, guitar and cello.
Agile and dynamic, Cold Fairyland has the dextrous fluidity of a jazz ensemble. Lin Di's pipa deftly picks its way across more languorous and sinuous extended cello lines. This layering of pizzicato and arco sounds gives the music a clear and transparent arrangement, with a variety of textures and the means to articulate subtle changes in tempo and metre. The presence of both bass guitar and cello sharing an overlapping pitch range also enhances the interweaving and interleaving nature of the ensemble. This highlights the novel use of cello in a non-classical ensemble and possibly also helps to inspire interesting arrangements and novel bass lines.
In the manner of some traditional Chinese music the overall effect is not that of building and releasing climactic tensions (as in classical and rock), but of a subtle ebb and flow through complementary group interaction. The shifting dynamics of the drums / percussion are notable in this respect. Part of this pattern is for tracks to end fairly abruptly in a way that to a Western ear sounds "unfinished".
Melodically I sense an influence from folk music, but whether this is mainly from the Chinese or European variety is not clear. In combination with the use of varied and unconventional metres this lends an approximation to some folk inflected progressive rock from the UK in the early 1970s. |
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 Cold Fairyland: Seeds on the Ground (2007) - 4,25 stars
Submitted on: 2008-09-29 |
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China hasn't been the home to many well known progressive rock artists so far, for many reasons. Different cultural traditions, as well as a society that was pretty closed to the outside world for many years, means that I'm not even sure if rock music as such is popular there. Enter Cold Fairyland, a Chinese band proudly announcing themselves to be a progressive rock act, with a handful of releases to their name.
"Seeds on the Ground" is a release somewhat similar in style to Norwegian act Green Carnation and their album "The Acoustic Verses". The songs are all dominated by acoustic or acoustic sounding instruments, the bass provides a basic melody line, the guitars adds a slightly more complicated melody line harmonizing with the bass. Unlike aforementioned Green Carnation release vocals aren't a central element here though, instead violins and the traditional Chinese instrument Ruan shares the dominating spot on these tunes, both of them adding a distinct folk-inspired and Chinese expression to compositions predominantly rock in style - although mellow in expression.
Good songs too, a few outstanding and the rest very good. Fans of mellow, progressive rock with influences from traditional Chinese music - or those who find this description interesting - have a release to check out here. |
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